How We Die Now

Intimacy and the Work of Dying

Karla A. Erickson, OHSU WT116 E68h 2013


Important message, conflated with coercive politics. Many people celebrate birth and seek involvement, most deny death and avoid being involved. Workers in most senior care facilities learn to accept death and fully involve themselves with the dying.

The pseudonymous example, "Winthrop House", 10 city blocks in a small midwestern college town, is a CCRC continuing care retirement community dedicated to aging in place. My WAG is that it is actually Seeland Park & St. Francis Manor, 31 acres.

While a few for-profit institutions suck, families can suck too. Example of resident with advanced directive, ignored by executor who wanted to keep pension and house rather than let patient die with dignity.

KHL comment: Abandoning parents and friends, because of fear and guilt and immaturity, cannot be corrected politically. Politics in a representative republic concentrates the best and the worst of the general population; if people are selfish fools, they elect representatives who implement selfish foolish policies with the power of government coercion. Messengers with unpopular truths are not celebrated, they are crucified. This can only be fixed if the enlightened teach the unenlightened, so that over time people become wise enough to shift social norms towards caring and civilization.

The book does not make me want to write pleading letters to politicians, but to find some old retired neglected engineers in the nearby adult care facility, and hang out with them.

HowWeDieNow (last edited 2017-02-12 00:48:31 by KeithLofstrom)